The Politics of the Psychiatric Biomarker

12-1PM = Meet & Greet Luncheon

1-2PM = Presentation followed by Q&A

In this talk, Professor Danielle Carr will describe one contemporary effort to find psychiatric biomarkers for depression through clinical trials of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS). Based on seven years of ethnographic fieldwork with clinical trials testing DBS for depression, and archival research, she argues that the current attempt to extract psychiatric biomarkers is refracted through the historical stakes of bioethical debates in the 1970s. The emergence of contemporary bioethics was structured by concerns about authenticity, which have, in turn, constructed the conditions in which current efforts to locate psychiatric biomarkers are conducted. This talk traces the implications of this history for contemporary efforts to map the brain.